Monday, 18 August 2008

Footage leaked of amazing new metaverse under construction

'City Space' is, apparently, a new virtual world being developed by LivePlace, a website owned by MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan. Apparently, the video below made its way onto the website by accident. Right. Now removed, the clip is of course alive and well in various copies on the web, and hyping up the existence of City Space in the process. The visuals it demonstrates are, quite simply, astonishing. Even if they are faked, as some are suggesting, just seeing a 3D world visualised in this way is amazing; a real taste of how designers perceive the future of virtual worlds.

Especially significant is the proposal that the world would be rendered server-side, which is a fancy way of saying that all of the complex calculations required would be performed by the City Space servers rather than on your computer. This would mean that you wouldn't have to have a particularly powerful computer to access the world; in fact the plans are that you would log in through your regular web browser. More information can be found here.